The White Nightgown
by justbecauseofthis
Summary: Eren and Levi are both confronted by strange images of a wax doll of Mikasa in a white nightgown. A dream, a hallucination, a vision? Meanwhile the last traces of childhood are sloughed away from Mikasa like dead skin; whatever innocence remains perishes. [Pairings: Mikasa/Levi, Mikasa/Eren] ***MANGA SPOILERS CH 107
1. Chapter 1

Eren has left Paradis Island, and Mikasa feels lonely, but she's able to grow in ways she couldn't with Eren always at her side. Meanwhile, Eren is on the mainland at the Marleyian hospital, and he's having hallucinations about Mikasa, but he's also taken advantage of by an aggressive older woman, which only exacerbates his confusion and mental deterioration. Last, Levi is sharing a similar psychic space with Eren; he sees images of Mikasa too, while he gradually opens up a friendship with her.

* * *

Mikasa

Her boots slosh heavily forward. Her feet sink into the sand. Air funnels up her leg, boiling through her clothes. Her hands dig into the water again as she fumbles on. The ship sails into the horizon, churning up a wake of smooth, clear glass. Mikasa's instinct of self-preservation clenches against the cold abrupt sense of solitude: _He's not looking back, he's not looking back, he's not—_

The ship sails away without stopping, with Eren aboard it, without her; he isn't looking back. The weight of water fills Mikasa's boots and her clothes. Through the thick of waves and sea salt she trudges on, pulling her hands through the ocean, propelled forward, compelled toward the ship.

 _He's not looking back . . ._

"Cover your ears."

Waist-deep in the water stands Captain Levi. She covers her ears. His arm lifts, a flare gun bulging from his grasp. The trigger releases. A pillar of smoke spews into the air, a bright red flame punctures the sky. Mikasa lets down her hands, looking at the ship. She sees him then, small with distance, shrunken away. He goes to the bow, his black pullover flapping in the wind. He grips the rail. She cups her hands around her mouth.

"Eren."

"You're not loud enough."

"Eren."

"He can't hear you."

"Eren—"

Eren doesn't move, gripping the rail, growing smaller with distance. Panic heaves through Mikasa in a sudden surge of dead cold blood. She's lurched forward, as if a steel wire has been anchored in her sternum at one end, nailed in Eren at the other—and now it's reeling her in, dragging her after him by the chest. The captain catches her around the waist.

"What do you think you're doing?" he says.

"I have something to tell him," she says. Her chest lurches after Eren. The captain's forecep thickens.

"You can tell him when he returns."

"I don't know if I—" All the breath and all the blood in her body rises to the very top of her sternum, sitting there on the point of a pin. She starts to gasp through the escalating pressure of the breath, the blood, and of the name.

"You've been holding it for much longer." The captain's voice is steady. His eyes are cold and steady too. "Isn't that right?"

She inhales, her mouth snapping open. All the escalation has built-up, bursting out. She doesn't hear her voice when she calls his name, only feels the hot, dry, voiceless rub of vocal cords, her vision going white, thinking: _He can't hear me and I don't know if I can do it anymore_ , going blind with the labor, the diaphragm squeezing long after the air has already been gone and emptied. She shrinks, her knees failing, shouting, her mouth snapped open, with all of the voice shouted out of her, the captain's forecep strained hard and steady against her stomach.

Her face starts to dissolve. The ship smudges against the high empty sky. Eren is a shapeless nothing now; it is only the rudder and behind it the peaceful stir of serene glass.

She sags like a purposeless boneless sack on Levi's arm. With his hand alone, his fingers fanned across her chest, Levi holds her above the water. Her head hangs. She stares into the faint, lonely eyes that the ocean reflects at her.

The captain says, "He can't afford to look back when he's moving forward. Do you understand? Don't take it personally."

The faint eyes blink. Coruscations glint in a hot, flashing brilliance as the eyes warble under a mask of emptying rings. The rings expand, fading as they grow.

A moment later the eyes reappear on the water, still faint, still lonely, her head still hanging.

"Take your hand away," she says.

Levi doesn't move.

"Take your hand away," she says.

He takes his hand away. It's the black hair that vanishes last, sucked below in a black swirling _plip_. The surface boils with her breath. It grows still. Levi waits. Under his eyes, the sun wrinkles fiercely on the water. The fierce horizon, too, has compressed the ship into a black gash upon the red wavering glare of the setting sun. Waves ruffle against Levi's ribcage. He waits. He watches the water.

It's her black hair that emerges first, sticking to her scalp. She rises and pinches salt from her eyes, beginning to walk toward the shore. Her hair clings close to her skull like a spill of tacky black oil. Levi turns his head. As she walks past, he turns his shoulders, pivoting at the waist with her passage. He watches her go.

On the beach, the rubber tread of her boots impress in perfect replica, disintegrating into glittering white sugar-sand when she reaches the backshore. The dunes rise, white, insurmountable, the reeds and grass thinning at the peaks. The horse lifts its head. Its ears flick. Mikasa mounts. Turning away now, Levi watches the sky close like a stitched wound as the black gash of the ship sinks away into the orange unfathomable eternal tranquility.

Levi

He puts a food platter on the mattress. Displaced soup spatters in the cup. He picks up the tray, putting it on the nightstand. Mikasa, sitting straight-backed, doesn't look at him, staring at the opposite wall, her eyes shallow in her face, as if they've been impressed by a round, blank stamp. She wears an old flimsy nightgown.

Levi takes up the knitted throw blanket, which lays folded on the foot of the bed, and flourishes it around her shoulders. She bears its weight, her face emerging from of its plaited shroud like a dial without ticks, a clock without hands, so that the passing can't be calculated by the second, the minute, the hour; and therefore time feels indefinite without the hands to inform you of its calculable finite value.

Levi takes the apple from the food tray and flicks out his pocket knife.

"You should eat," he says.

Her eyes are dim, mere indents. "Armin and Eren," she says. "They've begun to slip away from me. I'm going to lose them."

Levi looks at her a moment. The bedside sinks when he sits down. "You're only just now realizing this?" In his hand, the pocketknife shines like a silver minnow in the stream of daylight pouring from the window.

"It hasn't been long since Eren uncovered the memories of his father."

"That's not what I mean." Levi looks at his hands: One holds the apple, the other carves out an oblong slice. Juice dribbles over his thumb. When he remains silent, Mikasa removes her eyes from the wall and puts them on his cheekbone. He feels her but doesn't face her, slicing the apple in the cup of his hand.

"In this world," he says, "it's the strongest who survive. And those two were never as strong as you."

"I thought I could protect them. I thought—"

"I know very well what you thought. You care only about Eren and Armin, and you thought if you committed all your strength to them, and to them alone, you could guarantee their survival." Levi turns the knife toward Mikasa, a piece of cut apple stuck to the blade. He leans back a bit, looking at her without moving his head. "Your fidelity is remarkable, I'll give you that."

She says: "If you're trying to make me feel better," and stops.

"You're seeking consolation from me?" The knife is still turned out toward Mikasa, glistening with pale juice. "I wasn't aware that's what you were doing. Have my sympathetic sensibilities on any occasion been reliable?"

"No," she says without resentment, without sharpness even. "You'll only pour salt onto the wound."

His tongue clicks savagely in his mouth. "It's as I thought." He teethes off the piece of apple and digs the blade into the skin again. "The soup will go cold if you don't eat it soon. It's the recipe that helped Eren feel better when he was in a fugue."

"I remember. I recognized the smell. You always made it when he was having an episode." They say nothing then and don't look at each other. From above, the window sheds light in the interval between them, warming the air in a yellow thin bar.

"I don't feel well enough for food," Mikasa says. "I feel like there's tin in my stomach."

"Tin?" he says.

"That's how it feels."

When she inhales against the front of her nightgown, he can almost hear the small sound of the fabric expanding. When she exhales, the nightgown sags in flimsy white scallops, and he can see inside the folds, flicking his eyes away. He feels vague, as though he isn't here at all; as if he's somewhere else, doing something else. He runs his thumb along the blade's threshold. There's a faint ring of flesh-contact and steel.

"At this point, it isn't about saving your friends," he says, but he doesn't feel himself speaking, just hears the knife vibrating on the pad of his thumb. "It's less concrete than that."

Levi extends the knife again, another apple slice fixed to the tip. Hunger and saliva inundate Mikasa's mouth. "What meaning will Eren's life have if the choice comes to you?" he says. "Are you going to let Eren become a demon or will he fall a hero?" His eyes steadily hold hers. Without looking away, she opens her mouth, clamps her lips around the slice, and drags it off the blade. Fresh apple juice furls cool over her taste buds. She closes her eyes and chews.

In his lap, his hands continue carving the apple. Levi thumbs a slice into his mouth. When he speaks, he still sits turned away from her. "Tell me, do you trust my judgment?"

"Yes."

"Listen closely, then." His teeth make a fresh crisp sound. His earlobes move infinitesimally when he chews. "Eren will return home alive. You can lay your anxieties to rest, now."

Mikasa

Over the back of the wooden armchair, the old red muffler lays folded, thick with a fresh, fluffed quality. Mikasa goes to it. The fabric nearly dissolves under her fingertips, not old and not worn-out either, just soft and significant. She takes it up, the folds dropping apart, and brings it to her face, feeling it with her cheek, her lips. A perfume of soap suffuses its threads.

Who, she wonders, washed her muffler while she was sleeping?

She wraps it around her neck and caresses her palms over its scarlet tail. The door opens. The captain's shoulder slants against the frame, his hands in his pockets, his posture leaning in a kind of motionless, obdurate detachment. He's wearing a plain black shirt and plain black pants; his black hair is neat, and plain too.

"So . . . you're finally awake."

He looks at her through the front of his black hair, never lifting his chin. She spreads her fingers nostalgically across the muffler and closes her eyes and pulls the smell of clean cotton deep inside her belly. It spins within her gut like a deep-sea constellation of weightless shimmering memory-dust. When she blows it out, opening her eyes, her door is empty.

Nurse 4

Men bide their time in the recreation hall with board games, cards, and talk of war. It is an atmosphere of old, beaten, bullet-torn flesh; antiseptics; and the melancholic bitterness of undiluted whiskey. The nurses flutter about, fairylike, in their buttoned white dresses and their shiny pantyhose. They speak to each other when they pass, carrying conversation between each brief contact, ongoing communication, without end and without beginning.

Nurse 1: Can't someone else cover 18? I'm begging you.

Nurse 2: What's got you so unsettled, hon? 18 doesn't seem— All right, I'm coming, dear.

Nurse 3: It's not like he's Crazy Eyes, remember him? ha ha ha— God, that dickless bastard—

Nurse 1: I'm telling you, there's something— Mr. Shephard needs assistance getting back into his chair, please.

Nurse 3: Yes, I'll take care of it.

Nurse 2: And Mr. Habar soiled his sheets again.

Nurse 1: All right.

Nurse 2: 18 doesn't even sh—t himself, for goodness sake. If you cover Habar, I'll take 18.

Nurse 3: Darling, sometimes washing out a man's blistering asshole is preferable to—

Nurse 2: Then you get Habar.

Nurse 1: Please, ladies. I just— I can't go in that room anymore. You don't understand.

Nurse 4: Hush, now. He's only a hobbled man. Not even a whole man. Quit that hideous begging, darling. Don't you worry, I'll take 18.

The fourth nurse has cunning feline eyes and long black hair. The hair is important. Because Captain Levi was born from a woman who had thick black hair that fell luxuriously down her back, and it was the long black hair for which the mother had perished in indignity and anonymity and had left behind the child, alone and without a name. And once the child had grown into an adult, he remembered, still alone and still without a name, that it was the long black hair which had killed the mother.

The fourth nurse, who has long black hair and a rare subversive disposition of dominant female, agrees to take on Room 18 inhabited by the patient the other nurses do not want without knowing the reason for why they do not want him, simply knowing that he is not a patient to be wanted through some subconscious unspeakable antipathy.

Nurse 4: Good evening, sir. My name is Mary. I'll be taking care of you from now on. It's a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Kruger.


	2. Chapter 2

Mikasa

A pair of fingerless gloves seat her hands. The padding is worn, molded to the knuckle ridge. For a moment, she watches Captain Levi train. Attached to the ceiling with a chain, the leather bag grows warm under the syncopated command of his hands. The metal links grind under the strain.

The captain jerks backward as Mikasa's fist plunges by him, bodiless, appearing out of nothing. Displaced air cuts by his face, blowing hair across his temple where contact would've been made. He pulls his elbows in, gloves up, watching. Under the wet skin of his throat strikes the accelerated heart rate. The gymnasium echoes with unfilled space. The bag continues swinging from the speed and weight of the captain's hands.

Mikasa says: "I've noticed you're angry," and tenses her gloves. Only now does the bag start to slow its pendular swinging. "You can hit me if you want."

"Feeling generous, are you?"

"No." She flurries. The captain doubles back. She ceases, her gloves flexed near her face. Quietly, calmly, they gauge each other. "I'm also feeling angry. You'll agree to be my punching bag, right? In return, you can take your anger out on me too. It's only fair."

"You didn't give me time to make a choice."

"Please hurry and make a choice, Captain. We don't have all day."

She swings and he swings; their fists connect with the other's chin in twin movements like converging dimensional parallels, both locked with uppercutting knuckles jammed against each other's jawbones, mirrored from where their hands connect to the immoveable stance of their legs.

Breaking apart, they fall back, teeth bared, their eyeballs rattling in fluid, jolted inside their skulls. Once again, they gauge each other in that quiet charged calm.

Mikasa presses him.

The captain slips outside Mikasa's right hand, left, backpedaling. Again— Mikasa presses him. Sweat melts from the captain's temple. Leaning weight on his toes, he parries, lunging. Mikasa's head spins right. A welt flares on her cheekbone. She re-aligns, her jaw cracking a little— She's pressed back and pressed back again. She re-aligns, hands up.

Rigid metal-like striations flex across the captain's shoulder: Mikasa knows what he's going to do before he begins to do it, already ducking her head before his arm has contracted its full strength. The left jab too she anticipates, slipping out of his reach, knowing where and how to move before she's even begun to think it; before he's even begun to implement it against her; both acting on an undeviating, machinelike, athletic unison, as if they were being fed by a symbolic umbilical cord attached, not to their stomachs, but to something fundamental and impossible to locate, extended from each other at such point, circulating each other's essences and excesses, in a biological symbiotic womblike pathway.

Suddenly, a wall of wind blows up behind her. Her hair flies in front of her face in shrouding black strips. Her legs blow off the ground, whisking her feet straight into the air, lifted in frozen free-fall. A second: her body lies in supine levitation. Her heart lifts, momentarily untethered.

She drops.

Her heart thrusts back into her ribcage and sand particles jump into the air in a shimmery cloud. She thuds hard against the mat, her eyeballs lurched deep in her skull. She lies, flat on her back, not yet realizing that her legs have been altogether swept away from her, whirling in a spell of breathless vertigo.

Her palms flatten to the mat and she starts to remember, like she's shooting straight into the sky, the continuity of yesterday and today and tomorrow doubling over in folds, the way ocean waves overcome and run over one another, translating and escalating and finally crashing. She thinks: _It's always resided at the bottom of my heart, the fear. And it's floating back up again_ —her limbs and the fully-grown extensions of her nineteen-year-old self abbreviating into the legs and arms of a child.

Afraid for no reason at all, she begins to revert.

Vertigo churns her ear fluid.

"Hey." Poised above her, the voice is calm, steady, and fixed. The captain is the centrifuge, and there under him, Mikasa becomes displaced in sifted densities, a child again, still a grown woman. "How long are you going to lie there like that?"

Mikasa opens her eyes. The ceiling is tall, rotating above her. Bars of fluorescent lights bear down on her. The captain is crouched on the balls of his feet. She sits up. A blade of pain knifes through her. She flinches an arm around her gut. She breathes. She lets go of her stomach.

The captain's face appears, almost under her nose, peering beneath her hair. Mikasa meets his gaze. She sees herself looking into his eyes. He sinks backward again, balanced on the soft parts of his feet. Mikasa sees herself diminish into a small vague gleam.

". . ." The captain mutters in subdued undertones to himself: "Did I overdo it?"

"I'm all right," she says. "I grew too confident. I should've known better."

Levi looks at her, now with his head turned across the shoulder. His wrists sit in repose on his crouched knees. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm not feeling angry anymore," she says. "If that's what you're asking."

"Good." Levi straightens out of his crouch. He says: "You surprised me, suddenly attacking me like that. In the end, though, you've been helpful."

Mikasa stands too, looking down at him. He tilts his head back, almost in the exact manner as he had when he peered up beneath the fall of her hair.

"It's a relief to hear—" she says, unsnapping the strap around her wrist— "that our feelings are mutual."

Levi

The sun is setting, dividing the hall with openings of light beaming through the windows. The sunset catches the air in a grasp of red and flattens it against the wall, melting it onto the floor. Beyond the district, a final burst of sun shears apart at the top of the wall. Levi walks with his hands outside his pockets, passing an uncovered window. Red splitting light flares into his right eye and disappears, reappearing at the next window.

He turns, coming upon the eastern hall, windowless, darkened without the red expiring light. His feet carry him down it. The end approaches steadily, his feet steadily going ahead of him. His feet cease. He stops a second later. Mikasa appears in his view moments after his eyes have already fallen on her, looking at her, not seeing her at all.

Mikasa's hair looks almost blue against the pallor of her face. Her body drapes down straight from her collarbones like an old, limp suit on a wire hanger. Her boots are silent against the floor. When she advances, she doesn't seem to do the moving herself, as though the feet are moved for her, the body passively riding motion like a train passenger staring out a window. The rubber soles are gray, worn down as they lift and go away. Without speaking to him, without seeing him even, Mikasa passes.

Levi turns his shoulders. When his head comes to center, the hallway, as he begins to see it, cuts straight backward, extending behind him, the tiled floor and all of HQ in the sooty purple dusk of a dying day, silent, empty and endless.

Eren

 _Eren—_

He hears her from out of the fathoms of a distant no-place. A voice travelling miles on miles (down the timeline, starting at the beginning, moving toward the end, going from east to west, in the cardinal direction they want us to believe, telling us it's that simple. But history isn't a line, it's a circle in which yesterdays eat the tails of tomorrows, and that's why clocks are dials, and that's why women bleed, but he doesn't know much about that, not at all) and it is now that he finally hears her when they've already begun to approach the end, or is it the beginning? or perhaps it is only midnight. He is going to die. There's nothing he can do about that. But that's all right. It's just—he can't hear his own name anymore.

A hand clasps down, over the panic straining his lungs, as if to repress the thundering heart muscle by physical strength. The water hisses, beating the stone floor under his foot. Behind his eyelids, he tries not to see wax dolls wearing white nightgowns. He breathes, telling himself no, it's nothing, he's fine.

 _Eren—_

He shrinks against the shower wall. The cold abruptness of the stone shrivels his flesh—sorry, sorry, sorry—Yes, he's afraid to be alone. Loneliness grips him by the throat, and loneliness is in fact another version of dying. He doesn't want to be alone, has never been any good at it, not like the captain, and not like Mikasa. Perhaps those two are different versions of each other, like how loneliness and death are different versions of each other, and it's the same as hating yourself (which is the worst character flaw because it's the flaws of character which beget the hatred, or is it the other way around?), except you don't know it's self-hatred because you can't recognize your own reflection, because you don't know your own face.

That's right, he remembers, the image inside the glass doesn't consolidate to the face of— Eren Jaeger? Eren Kruger? There are times when Eren Jaeger doesn't have a reflection. There are times when Eren Jaeger isn't Eren Jaeger himself at all— Jaegar— Kruger—Jae— the father was— i—him—me _eren?_ —no its nothing im fine…... or perhaps—I was bequeathed the valueless name, the anonymous non-legacy of my mother?

He opens his eyes.

The tourniquet around his leg-stump leaks blood. In a thin dark swirl, it flows down the drain.


	3. Chapter 3

Mikasa

Her thighs overcome the captain.

Blurred with his running, Captain Levi's legs pump twofold for each one of Mikasa's long strides. They look across their shoulders at each other. Puffs of dust are cranked behind the beat of their rapid shoes. Churned into the air, dust hovers above the looping path in a long chute of dirt-smoke. They run hard, looking at each other, their arms strongly thrusting, never lurching their shoulders more than a centimeter. They don't look at the path at all, moving their limbs, without moving their chests or their heads, seeming to move only by the smoothly operating ball-joints of their ankles, their shoulders, their hips. The shaft of dust swirls furiously behind them. They lunge chestfirst across the finish line, never breaking eye contact.

Mikasa jogs to a walk, putting her hands on her head, feeling the artery in her neck thudding all the way into her ear canal.

"It was too close to call," says Hanji. She touches her chin, her eyes abstracted in reflection, replaying what she's seen seconds after she's already seen it, trying to see it better in retrospect than she had in real-time. Sun flashes garishly on her glasses. She shrugs. "Sorry, guys."

Mikasa pivots. She advances on a winded Captain Levi. "I have more than a shred of self-respect, Captain."

"I'm aware," he says, and lifts his palms, threading his fingers behind his head. Blue veins thunder through the pale undersides of his biceps.

"Give me nothing short of your best effort," she says. "Anything less is an insult."

"Aren't you getting ahead of yourself?" he says coldly, a little thinly, out of breath. He seems to look down at her without sprouting inches at the knees to exceed her suddenly in length. Just looking at her with those hard, immobile eyes, looming, the top of his head barely reaching her nose. "Or perhaps you're overestimating my generosity. Either way, you're misunderstanding."

Mikasa says nothing. Their panting slows and steadies, their mouths close. Their nostrils flare with their gradual cooling breath. Levi puts his hands down at his sides, his biceps still round, still pulsing, his nose flaring. "I'm growing older, and you're only growing stronger," he says, with more voice now, less air. "It's nature's order. In any case, I'm relieved to know that if I'm unable to carry out my role, there's someone else who can close the distance."

"If you can't, then—" Mikasa's eyes slant and squint against the sun. The sprawling grass burns, bristling to a hot, withered brown. "Even I have to admit it, Captain Levi: There's nobody but you."

"That must pain you to say," he says. She only looks at him, her black eyes neither cold nor injured nor indifferent. "Are you disappointed?" And his voice is calm with the same non-injury, the same non-indifference.

"What else will I strive for if I surpass Humanity's Strongest?"

"I suppose you'll have to surpass Mikasa Ackerman, as many times as you can."

"Your sympathetic sensibilities haven't improved any. I'm still disappointed."

"Well . . ." He turns, beginning to return to HQ. "I'll try to do better, then."

Mikasa

Mikasa's mouth drains of color. She can only stare a blank, rigid stare.

"It's not only the royal bloodline that should continue to succeed," the woman Kiyomi Azumabito says. "You're still young and still healthy, still beautiful. And most importantly, the last artifact of your ancestry. You're special, Mikasa."

Mikasa feels her eardrums begin to throb slow and hard. Historia hadn't expressed wishy-washy principles or uncertainty: _I'll do it_ , she had said with that dignified unflappability of self-sacrifice. Mikasa tugs her muffler high over her chin.

"I'm not . . ."

"Ready? Perhaps not. But you're about the right age, now." Kiyomi smiles and her eyes slit into thin upturned crescents, almost like Mikasa's but smaller, purer, untouched by Other dominant blood. "And I'm sure we can find a father of good heritage."

"I'm sorry. I'm not interested." Mikasa turns about-face, her muffler hiding the shape of her mouth. Her feet take her away.

She leaves the conference room, going down the hall. The captain turns from a small circle of people, looking at her. Jean too. Then Floch. And as she continues down the hall, other men turn to look at her, men she knows, men she doesn't know, and she grows very aware of the irreconcilable dimensions between Us and Them, which has never occurred before.

Her pupils shrink and her eyes turn inward. Vision fades and diminishes with introspection as she thinks, still walking down the hall, about the secrets lying under the envelope of her skin, now branded in red by pedigree and by legacy. Two concepts which she has only begun to learn about. She walks, visionless, introspective, feeling a strong wave of self-consciousness sweeping over her, very aware of her own body, of the flesh, and of the black black hair sweeping into her eyes.

When she steps outside, hearing the door shut behind her, she's shaking in the evening climate, realizing that the paranoia afflicting her is that of a little girl; that she's afraid in the same way a little girl is afraid, reverting back into age, chased back by interrogative eyes and the arbitrary hierarchical subservience of her own gender. She's not a little girl though, hasn't been one for some time now, dead from the day she was spread out on the floor in childish vanquished acquiescence beneath the murderers of her parents. But she hasn't forgotten the fear. She still shakes with it.

The old memory fabric brushes her mouth. She closes her eyes. Without looking, she knows the sun has dropped, feeling the slip in temperature, and she wonders if all men stand on one horizon and all women stand on the other, with all the oceans of the worlds between them, the sun blazing the water into a surface of hot white light, and if she were to step over to Eren's side, she'd be incinerated. In one jarring eye-opening instant of unretractable illumination, she finally knows what Eren is—and likewise what she herself is.

She wonders if Eren knows it too, if he'll learn it one day. She opens her eyes onto a blue twilight-sunken district, thinking about it as hot solid blood burns slowly up her neck.

Mikasa

Dust flows down the hall like the sluggish smoke of old canon fire. The captain is alone, wearing black. He is ahead of her, walking. His step is a little wooden, yet still steady and still reliable. One foot comes down too woodenly against the floor. Mikasa advances. She makes no sound. Without knowing she's there behind him, Captain Levi turns, sensing through some ability beyond knowledge, beyond logic, something beyond human faculties even, that her eyes are touching the back of his head. They stop walking.

"I understand now," she says. "You fell behind because of your leg." Levi says nothing. "All this training is aggravating old injuries. Am I right?"

"You're concerned?"

"Yes." Mikasa watches Levi. "I need you to be in top form so that I can become better than the best of you." Even though they speak in the hallway, and even though their hands are bare-knuckled, and even though neither person feels any anger or anxiety for whatever reason, they still seem to gauge each other with that calm, savage charge of anticipation.

"I see," he says calmly, quietly, a shade away from ungently.

His arms are crossed, tucked up against his pectoral plates. He is a compact man with shoulders and quads, without being bloated or thick-necked, or too wide for her to sling her arms around his chest and drop him. She always thought if she were to wrap her hands around Eren's waist, she could hold him entirely in her palms, her fingertips coming together at his back. He's tapered there. A narrow, boyish geometry. The captain doesn't cut at such a drastic inversion of width, from shoulder to hip. A little more body, a little more breadth. And maybe that's why she can spar with Captain Levi, but not with Eren. Because Eren has that small, containable waist, and the captain doesn't.

"Captain Levi," she says. He is already looking at her. They are both already looking at each other. "Let's go to the infirmary together."

When they go to the infirmary together, the room appears on the other side of the door in white, antiseptic vacancy. A row of white empty beds and starched sheets; walls of white cabinets and white drawers. Metal springs grate when Levi sits down on a bed. Mikasa opens two cabinets. She closes them. She opens a drawer, closes that one too. Sidestepping, she opens two more cabinets. They clash shut. Another drawer rolls open, unresisting on the internal metal tracks. It thuds closed a second later.

Levi points. "Look in that drawer over there." He doesn't ask what she's looking for, nor does she tell him. But Levi knows, and Mikasa knows that he knows.

Mikasa walks over a few more paces and slides the drawer out of its hatch. She reaches in. When her fingers come back, compression bandages inhabit her grasp. Length of flesh-toned tape falls from the bundled roll as she negotiates a section of it undone. She closes the drawer and goes to Levi. Her boots make soft, composed rubber sounds. He hears the soft, composed sound of her knees too when she sinks below him, the black hair falling over her eyes. He sits on the edge, his legs hanging slack over the bedside, inflating his plain black trousers with calves and quads. Grasping the bundle of tape, her hand freezes.

"Captain," she begins to say.

He lifts his palm, saying nothing, not even bothering to look at her now.

She aligns the compression bandages to the longest leg bone. "Please hold this here," she says. He does. She starts to wrap his muscle. "You can remove your hand," she says. He does. The tape overlaps where his hand lifts. "Does it feel too tight?"

"No."

Without taking her eyes off his leg, she sees him sitting above her on the bed, with his head bent forward. Not looking down on her. But looking at her. Not proud. Not dominant. Looking at her as if they were level, neither one having to lift or drop the eyes to maintain parallel. As though they're at the same altitude. The same degree. He doesn't impose. He only looks at her like they've been standing on the same ground since the beginning of the beginning—before that, even.

She fastens the bandages and removes her hands. The shape of his calf asserts itself, tautly contoured by the tape. "There." Still on her knees, she uplifts her face. "How does it feel?"

"It's not bad," he says. "But in my opinion, you'd make a strange nurse." Mikasa says nothing, doesn't even begin to disagree, her face uplifted, with black hair falling out of her eyes. "Your patients would be unsettled by that gloomy expression of yours," he continues, speaking in something like a mutter, but projected and clear without quite containing the same substance or volume as a speaking voice.

She rises. "Well, if I ever find myself at the crossroads of a career change, I could always evoke your sunny disposition. I'm sure that'd put people at ease."

"Yes. I've been told my hospitable nature is very effective."

Mikasa looks at him. He hasn't leaned experimental weight on his doctored leg yet, draping it over the bedside.

It's been years. But Captain Levi doesn't appear any older than he did years ago. He just looks like a man who doesn't sleep. Maybe people do most of their aging while they're asleep. And that's why old people are startled by their own reflections in the morning because they forget and only remember when they see their old faces in the glass again, reminding them that sixty-something years have passed while they were fast asleep. But the captain doesn't sleep, and so the aging doesn't occur. For over twenty years, he's been the very same age as he was over twenty years ago, from the night he forgot to go to sleep for the very first time while he was being alive somewhere in the underground.

"Rest it well, Captain Levi," she says. "Tomorrow, I'm going to win against you properly." She turns and starts toward the door.

"Mikasa," he says and she looks over her shoulder. He's still sitting with his leg limp and lethargic. "For how much longer, I can't be certain. But even with this bad leg, I'm still the strongest. So . . . continue to strive."

"Yes sir." Mikasa doesn't smile, but she salutes.

Levi

The fire burns steadily. Levi sits in the armchair, his cheek braced upon his knuckles. The living room is bare, with three walls, the firelight filling it, the armchair pinned at the center.

Sleep is like practicing the state of being dead and almost everybody needs to be a little dead sometimes. Even Levi needs to be a little dead sometimes, less than most, but dead long enough and dead deeply enough that his body can keep going and he can resurrect himself before the morning has begun to rise.

He sits in the armchair, looking at the fire, not being dead (he won't be even a little dead until a few hours from now), doing nothing. Not moving, without his lungs expanding, without seeming to breathe, sunken in the upholstered armchair, with his bandaged leg wooden and inert beneath him. He watches the fire, not feeling his eyes doing the watching, submerged in something like a dreamless waking sleep. His eyes are glass without focus, without thought. Light blows passively into the corneas.

The vertebrae in his neck creak when his head turns. He hasn't felt his eyes see it. But his head has turned by a pure, infallible instinct which was instilled in him at birth. Darkness is thickened in the hallway, clotted, pulsing against the residue of firelight. He knows he's seen it, though his eyes hadn't felt it. He crosses the room without remembering rising out of the chair and goes into the hallway and follows after what he hadn't felt his eyes see, but knows he must've seen because his head has turned by that pure and infallible instinct which he'd been born with.

Night floods the hallway. He goes along by intuition and memory, sightless. Soon the walls, the floor, begin to swim from out of the dark, materializing upon his view, his pupils flexing like plastic discs to funnel in the scarce refractions of phantom light. He turns. Five windows let in a thin, wan moon.

Wading through the darkness and the heatless nightwash, he sees the moon five times, huge and low-slung in the sky, the wall beneath it like a black belt cinched around the city. He reaches the fork. He goes left. The dark surges over him again. A dull gold knob bulges out from the doorway. He takes it in his hand, turning his wrist. Silently he pushes.

In the serene and complete suspense of midnight, she sleeps with that face like an indefinite, handless, incalculable clock. The sheets, tugged high over her shoulder, show no sign of fresh movement. She has been sleeping, uninterrupted, for a while now. Levi stands in the door, frozen. He begins to remember more clearly, remembering at last what he hasn't felt himself see. The images boil up to the forefront of his mind, and as he begins to remember, he begins to think that he couldn't have seen what he knows he's seen. Because what he's seen, he decides, couldn't have been seen by anyone at all.

When he steps back outside the door, pulling it shut, his eyes come open, the velvet of the armchair cupped inside his hands, his dead leg draped underneath him. The fire burns steadily, and within the hearth, among the flames swirls the lost promise of a whispering white nightgown.

Eren

Miss Mary slips out the room and spins against the wall, faint and breathless. A weak trembling hand clasps down over her heart, between her breasts. Her thighs quiver with long exhausted energies. She keeps her thighs from touching. She drags away from the wall and reaches behind her head to gather her long black hair in her hand. Perspiration glistens on her neck; little baby hairs curl with body steam. The artery in her throat bulges hot. From across the hall, Eren watches as she pins the hair up over her moist nape. Inside the hospital room, a man calls for her. His voice is mostly grunt. She inserts the pins and starts to go in again.

"You missed a piece," Eren says.

Miss Mary spins. She stares. Her eyes are unfocused, as if synaptic electricity hasn't quite communicated what she's seeing yet. Then she strokes along her neck. She finds the missed piece and fastens it on top of her head.

"Mr. Kruger, are you all right?" she says. Eren is leaning heavily on his crutch. "Do you need assistance returning to your room?"

"Thank you, but I'll make it on my own." He thinks he relaxes his face a little, just enough. "I can wipe my own ass and everything."

"That's very good, Mr. Kruger. Very good indeed." Miss Mary doesn't show her teeth, but she's smiling, and her cheeks, her lips, are shining and full with fresh color. "You're quite fortunate, you know. Some men here can't even play with their own cocks, if they still have a cock to play with. Go enjoy yourself a little, why don't you?" She smiles again, almost savagely now—she may be making fun of him—and slips back into the room. Through the closing door, the white nurse's slippers lay discarded by the institutional bed.

Mikasa

Without looking away from the punching bag, Mikasa sees in the mirror-paneled room the figure of herself, squared-up, a thick gouge of muscle channeling up her leg, her arms well-expressed in the aftermath of her athletic regimen. Against the opposite wall, very small, miniscule almost in the periphery, sits Historia dressed in her military coat.

"You've been silently watching for a while now," Mikasa says. "Is there something you want to say to me?"

"I know you must be going through a hard time," Historia says. "But you don't need to be alone. You can rely on me a little."

"I'm all right." Mikasa sees the reflected figure of herself lower her gloves. "I'm beginning to think that, maybe, it'll be good for the both of us to be separated for a short time. When I watched him set off, in that moment I felt that I had always been an attachment. Because of the way everything began between us, he and I could never be equals."

"Mikasa . . . I can't know this for sure, since I'm only a bystander. But isn't Eren the one who's always felt inferior to you?" Historia's eyes flick off Mikasa's face, flicking over to Mikasa's reflection. "You're the lost descendant of the Shogun clan. You're the woman worth more than a hundred soldiers. You're Mikasa Ackerman."

Mikasa doesn't turn to Historia, standing there, motionlessly. "I'm only beginning to learn what that means." Mikasa holds her hands out, upturned, looking at her palms, the shred and fatigue in her padded gloves. "But when the time comes, I'll be the one to carry him home."


	4. Chapter 4

Mikasa

The dining hall is large, plenty large for the lot of them. But the profound meaningless noise of twenty people multiplies into two-hundred, the mouths and the tongues and all the micro-articulations of speech springing upon four walls, and shooting across the dining hall again in those massive invisible waves of sound, multiplying each one person by the exponent of ten, inducing a sense of tight quarters and claustrophobia. One person grows louder, then the next person grows louder, then the next person grows louder too, each person's voice spinning through the thick exponential growth of meaningless noise.

There is a lot of talking, a lot of tin clashing. A dull phantom-pressure builds behind the middle of Mikasa's forehead, as though she's losing streams of blood from a small invisible incision at the center of her skull, feeling like she's floating, just outside her own body: her arms like deflated shirt sleeves, unfilled, and all she must do is thrust her arms forward through her body's empty, uninhabited arm-sleeves to dress herself again in her own envelope of skin and muscle.

It is too loud. It is too early. She can't remember the last time she ate.

Hitch is talking. She hasn't stopped talking since they've started to eat. "—shy. Goes all the way to the back of the showers. Isn't that funny?"

Jean is blushing. "Why are you talking about what girls do in the showers, Hitch?"

"I think it's funny because Mikasa's so—" Hitch curls her arm.

"Shut up," says Jean. "She's—she's—she's the complete opposite of you. That's the kind of woman she is."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Mikasa's right there, you know." Connie points. Their heads turn. They see the concealing drape of her black hair, the muffler falling from her throat. Her hands are motionless in her lap.

"Oh," says Hitch. "She's not listening anyway."

Mikasa looks at her, sidelong, not looking angry, not looking annoyed either. But her pupils have constricted quite small. Hitch sits back a little. Mikasa doesn't look angry, but something very calm and very dark brews beneath her face, her hands relaxed and unfolded against her legs.

"Aren't you all growing a little too relaxed?" she says. Her voice is unmoving, more tones than it is volume. "I can't help hearing the conversations that are going on around me; how inconsequential your worries are. Have you forgotten our situation?" Their faces go taut as the situation confronts them all over again. "Historia is being coerced into a corner. And Eren is across the ocean, on the mainland. Alone. How can you gossip so lightly right now?" Still, her voice doesn't move, doesn't give anything away other than the calmness and the dark brewing self-containment.

Jean is the first to speak. "One, don't associate me with Hitch; she's the one gossiping. Two, we're all worried about Historia. She's our friend too. And three . . . Eren left us, Mikasa. He ran away. The pressure was too much for him."

"You're wrong." Mikasa remains still self-contained, still brewing darkly. Her hands begin to move now. She puts them on the table. "That doesn't sound anything like Eren. He left because he's going to find a way to—"

"Hey—" Next to Mikasa, a heavy military boot drops against the bench. The table rattles. It vibrates with a force communicated through a compact leg, through the wood, and finally onto them, jolting through Squad Levi. Mikasa's spine is erect, her eyes widened fractionally.

The captain's strong shin bone extends up into his knee, bent with the indomitable heaving force of his compactness. His arms are crossed. He's not wearing the compression bandages anymore. He speaks with less viciousness, less force and punctuation than his boot: "I can see that my precious subordinates are enjoying their continental breakfast. Especially this foul-tempered girl, here. How is it, Mikasa, the food Nicolo thoughtfully prepared for us this morning?" The tray sits untouched in front of her. The captain bends his face, pulling the tray into the crux of his attention. "Oh . . . " he says, and he says it with slow, mocking irony, but there is no added force, no viciousness either, still quieter than his military boot. Mikasa doesn't look at him.

"That's right, Mikasa." Across the table, Sasha shoves a pastry in her mouth. "Nicolo made this meal with us in mind. It's his ingenious creation."

The captain continues: "Have you become so comfortable with the Survey Corps' new cushy lifestyle that you'll waste food like a spoiled brat?" and even now, speaking without the viciousness or the force of his military boot.

"That won't be necessary, Captain." With all the grave immutable sincerity of a child, Sasha presses her fist to her heart. "I'll selflessly take it upon myself, sir, to finish her leftovers. They won't go to waste."

Levi cuts his eyes at Sasha without moving his face, his eyes following her hand as it reaches graspingly across the table. Captain Levi's bad leg, still extended from the military boot planted on the bench, seems to hum next to Mikasa's arm, prickling her with the hyperarousal responses of her most primal intuitions.

Armin seizes Sasha's elbow, retracting her reach, guiding it back down under the table. The captain's eyes flick back to Mikasa. He hasn't moved his face at all. She hasn't moved hers either, looking at him, without facing him, from the corner of her eye.

"Let me ask you, do you want to bring Eren back home in one piece?"

Mikasa says nothing. She knows that he knows, and he knows that she knows that he knows; so there is no need for any exchanged words, no need for answers. Without looking away, arched tall above her, he takes up the apple from her breakfast tray. And still, without looking away, he snaps his wrist, the apple spinning into the air, dropping into his palm a split-second later.

Before she knows he's moved again, the apple claps against her teeth, thrust suddenly between her lips. The skin breaks with a sweet, juicy crunch as her front teeth pierce the fruit by secondhand force. The taut faces of the squad emerge behind the captain now. They stare. Captain Levi is looking at her, hasn't looked away since the beginning. His hand rests passively on his knee, as if it hasn't moved a centimeter. A little more white shows in Mikasa's eyes, her lips jammed open around the apple. Her teeth scrape out a piece. The apple falls into her palms. A deep bite mark is gouged from its meat.

"I'll be the one to bring him home," she says coldly, chewing, sitting very calmly, very straight and still.

"Is that right?"

"Yes sir." Her teeth drag through the apple again.

"Your muscle mass has been deteriorating," he says. "If you don't keep up your strength, I'll have to be the one to drag him all the way back here on my own."

"It's my responsibility. I'll be the one to carry him home."

"Take your responsibilities seriously, then. I don't have the time to chase around a rebellious little shit who's run away."

She doesn't look at him. "Focus on your own objective, Captain. I'll focus on mine." She bites from the apple again. The juice spreads, lukewarm, tasteless, in her mouth.

"Good, then."

"By the way, your leg seems to be feeling better." Her prickled arm hair has begun to puncture her shirt sleeve. She sits rigidly on her spine.

"Yeah," he says. "It looks like you knew what you were doing." He removes his boot from the bench. The hyperarousal subsides, the hair wilting sideways against her arm. The captain leaves. Mikasa watches his back. As he goes, his gait is evenly distributed among both legs. The woodenness of yesterday has ebbed back into the tide.

Jean's face swings around toward Mikasa. "What did he mean, muscle mass? Why was he looking at your muscle mass? What kind of guy is the captain?"

"Huh?" Food crumbs drop from Connie's mouth, his fingers poising a biscuit in buttery suspense a few inches from his lips. "What are you talking about? You're the one who's always looking at Mikasa's—"

Jean closes his right hand and brings it down on top of Connie's head.

Mikasa clicks her teeth. "How annoying," she says flatly, speaking too low, almost out of pitch. "Does he think he's my mother?"

Sasha points, a little hesitant, maybe even a little reluctant. "That seemed familiar, though. Didn't it? Like—like— _de la vie_?"

"I think you mean _déjà vu_ , Sasha," Armin says. "And it seemed familiar because it's a scene we've seen before. It's ironic. Eren didn't like to be overbearingly mothered either, Mikasa."

Two pink splotches burn into Mikasa's cheeks.

Jean says, "Are you saying Captain Levi and Mikasa are the same? Because that's not true, Armin."

"I don't know," says Sasha. "They both have scary faces."

The pink splotches grow hotter on Mikasa's cheekbones. She puts down the apple core.

"Don't listen to her." Jean's oatmeal slips from his spoon before he can dispatch it onto his palate. "Your face isn't scary."

"Pervert," says Connie.

Jean boils.

Across from her, Armin looks at Mikasa without judgment, his hands thrust below the table. She can see him above the chest, sitting a bit stiff-shouldered. "The captain has a point, Mikasa. You should eat. You've been dropping weight ever since Eren left. I was beginning to worry. It seems the captain is worried too." She may not remember the last time she's eaten, but since the day Eren left, neither her appetite nor her stomach has confronted her body with hunger or pain. "And you've been a bit short-tempered these past couple days. Are you okay?"

"I'm sorry to have worried you, Armin. But I'm fine." She looks at her half-eaten apple, her idle breakfast tray. Armin's hands remain beneath the table, his shoulders stiff. "You don't need to worry about me anymore."

Mikasa

Pain swims inside her head again. Her vision darkens. It returns a moment later. She doesn't even pause, walking down the hall, paying no mind to the tiny bleeding incision at the epicenter of her skull.

As she goes, she hears the skirts and the clicking heels in front of her before seeing the two women. They don't walk; they insinuate their presences with a flourish of hips. One is a woman with a largeness about her, with pink skin like a cherub, wearing velvet. The other woman has a long fall of perfect black hair, younger, thinner, with eyes that seem to have never thought beyond what she's already seen, what she's always known, thinking only of the past. Mikasa stops. The women speak to each other in soft, birdlike murmurings.

"Why are there so many hallways? How can anyone find their way around here?"

"At night, too."

"Ridiculous. That's why we have only three floors."

The one in velvet sees Mikasa first. She rushes over on her hard, swift heels, the dress rippling liquidly where her overflowing figure strains and swells against the velvet. Her hands clasp Mikasa's shoulders. Mikasa tenses, holding perfectly still.

"My girl," she says. Her round forearms seem to flap with opulence. "What are you wearing? This won't do. This won't do at all. Take off that hideous thing around your neck. It's not even winter. These are men of war. If they find you like this, I won't be able to stop them from—"

"Madam," the other woman says. "She isn't one of us. She's a soldier. She's wearing their emblem. See?"

"A soldier?" The woman's hands jerk away. "A soldier?" The cherubic skin of her face grows hotter, spreading all the way into her bosom. She speaks in raspy feminine sighs, panting: "Of course, she's not one of mine. I knew that. Of course, I knew that. I know all my girls. I handpicked every single one. That black hair, though. Are you certain she's not—No, no, of course not. You're not one of mine. What am I saying? But that hue of hair is—"

Mikasa feels herself divide down the middle, half of herself weakening into the farthest distance, thinning into something flat and purposeless, the reversion again, back to when she was a dead girl on the floor, her hands succumbing to the acquiescence. And the other half of herself feels the old memory of her muffler hanging, passively, around her neck. Red, soft, full of remembering. She hears the flesh of her fists, not yet moving, not yet getting ready, but thrumming somehow with the power, the biology, remembering what Eren had told her at the crises of the dead girlish vanquishment.

"I think it's this way, Madam."

"Yes, yes. Let's hurry, now."

The hard, crisp sound of high-heels diminishes down the hall. The muffler lays passive on Mikasa's chest. Beneath it resides the weight of the breath, of the blood, and of the name, balancing on a pin at the very top of her sternum.

Levi

The woman's black hair falls down her back. All the way down her back. Her calves hush through layers of fabric, and they listen, they strain to hear it. She doesn't speak, but her legs are long, and they listen, they strain to hear the flesh of her thighs moving against the dress and against each other. Her eyes are sleepy, dreamless liquid. Women's perfume gushes behind her. Her lips are fixed up at the corners, latched, gridlocked in certain mirthful concealment. She grins very hard at them.

She turns her head, her black hair falling and falling until their eyes stop on the lowest curves of her back. She grins very hard at Levi. Off to the side, he stands alone; and solitary men are their own kind of terror. A gang is a physical, recycled menace. A man by himself is individual and unpredictable. His arms are closed, insulated, folded over his chest.

Her lips stretch all the way back over her molars.

"Now, don't damage her. She's one of my best girls. You got that, boys?"

"Don't worry, Madam. Old man Pyxis will take good care of her. Isn't that right?" They laugh.

Pyxis is sitting in the armchair, his crinkling eyes folded into sightless humored half-moons. "What perverse things do you want this poor girl thinking about me, exactly?" He smiles without canines, without gums. Just a benign gesture of his papery, un-predatory mouth because he's an honest man who's woken up alive on the anniversary of conception. "Thank you for coming all the way here, Madam. But there seems to be a misunderstanding. I'm only a penniless old man who's trying to keep his bare ass covered for a couple more years."

He sits in his armchair with his hands on his knees. His eyes look quietly out at the girl from inside his bare-headed, paper-wrinkled face. "I'm truly sorry about the confusion, young lady. To think I call these shameless men my comrades." His hands don't move at all. "Why don't you tell me your name, and I'll get you two something to drink?"

She tells him her name. And Pyxis smiles, his hands motionless on his knees. The tub of ice rattles, giving up a bottle of booze when Levi reaches in. He pops the top. He drinks. Blue cigar smoke wreathes the smutty atmosphere of alcohol, tobacco, and the cryptic duplicity of female perfume. He leaves, hearing the hard, punctuated heels behind him, smelling the path where she's passed through, infecting the air with her sharp synthetic scent. The young woman watches him go out the door, grinning too hard to be smiling.

"Again, Madam," says Pyxis, his hands never moving. "I'm truly sorry for the misunderstanding."

The laughs of twenty men roar out the open door. It closes. The laughs cease. Going down the hall, Levi raises his wrist, not watching where he's going, not needing to watch where he's going, walking straight without going anywhere. Behind him the roar of their voices fade. Booze funnels down his throat. As he continues, intervals of wall lamps puddle somber yellow light on the floor.

He knows he shouldn't have come here. He had known it before they involved the women. He had known it since last night when he'd opened his eyes and the fire was still going. He keeps drinking until he's done. Lowering his wrist, walking straight, going nowhere, he hasn't even begun to feel halfway full.

Now, he starts to remember his own name.

Eren

The door has not been closed, and so Eren can see their outlines, their bodies darker than shadow. The man has her bent over his knee. The teeth in his face spit swears and filthy slanderous epithets. When it finally happens, Eren flinches at the sound, coiling in his arms, coiling in his legs, the regenerative flesh hissing in his leg-stump. He hears his own wounds, ready to burn, to re-thread with quantum blood and heat. Through the door, he watches, the skin cells hissing faintly inside his tourniquet.

Bent, childlike, over the man's leg, the nurse is crying. Drool runs over her red engorged lips. She sobs and kicks her legs out behind her, the white uniform lifted over the swells of smooth round skin bristling with five scarlet finger welts. She calls him daddy. She screams it. She writhes like a dying burning body, sobbing, Daddy Daddy I'm sorry sir _please—_

Eren can feel the blood slowing in his face, can feel himself going numb. The leg-stump goes quiet and cold. Slowly and rigidly, he thumps his crutch back to his room. The sobs fade. He thumps inside his room and closes the door and sits on the edge of his bed. Inside his face the blood is frozen dead. He turns up his hands and looks at them. They're bleached yellow, bloodless, tinged a little blue, as if. As if.

He looks in the mirror. His one good eye is mostly black with just a sliver of colored ring.

Mikasa

"It's Commander Pyxis's birthday," Historia says. "It was a joke the Garrison played."

Mikasa says nothing.

Historia smiles. It's a lipless, impersonal smile. "There are some things you and I won't humor in, things we won't understand, because of our upbringing. We've had a difficult time. But don't blame them too much, Mikasa. They're still our comrades." Historia wears a casual country dress. Her hair flows straight down her neck. "Thank you for agreeing to meet me here."

They've agreed to meet in an empty conference room that bulges out, in a windowed semi-circle, from the main building. Again Mikasa says nothing. She's not thinking about Pyxis anymore or the Garrison or the pretty high-heeled women, or the contrasting horizons and the ocean between them. The warmth in her palms has receded, leaving them gray and without feeling. She closes her eyes. She opens them. She touches the center of her forehead.

Outside the sun is a dim red circle. As the sun sinks, the flat red squares of window-frames slowly stretch across the floor.

"I know it must sound silly to you, but Yelena thought it'd be a good idea to hold a military ball to raise morale."

"You're right," Mikasa says, without feeling herself speaking, her lips numb. "It sounds silly to me. And Yelena is wasting our time with pointless distractions."

"I'm going to trust Yelena's judgment on this. Keeping up the morale of my armies in a time of war, after all, isn't pointless. You would agree, wouldn't you, Mikasa?"

Mikasa's head is immobile and stiff on her neck. She says nothing. Historia walks over to the corner of the room. There stands a metal four-legged machine with a cone of brass expanding out like a great metal esophagus.

"It's called a phonograph." She slants a horizontal bar over a grooved black disc. "It plays music." Beneath a needle, the disc begins to rotate. From the hollow channel and brass mouth swells the symphony of vast nonexistent instruments. Mikasa goes bone-still with listening, her eyes glowing with the sunset.

"Somewhere—and it could've been miles away from here, years ago—somebody produced this song and it etched into this disc and preserved itself there. Now we can listen to it whenever we want."

It's as though the machine has undermined time, has reversed the sad evanescent failing of human memory.

Mikasa turns her head. An extravagant mirror hangs on the wall. Inversely suspended in the glass, there she is, standing in the forlorn captured eternal otherworld of a dim red room, wearing her Survey Corps coat. She watches herself listening to the music, feeling displaced and multiplied at once—and more than that—reiterated.

Historia negotiates the empty room. She puts out her hand, saying: "Take my hand." Mikasa takes it. "As the royal head, I must be visible. Yelena says I'll be the one to lead the first dance. That's the reason I've asked you here, so I can practice."

Their feet fix at that elusive junction between distance and proximity, becoming neither distant nor proximate, both at the same time.

They begin to dance.

The flat red window-frames stretch over their moving feet.

Historia says, "Thank you for helping me. You're a good person, Mikasa."

"You're—" Mikasa's complexion warms. Suddenly her arms have begun to fill, thrust forward into her skin again, just now arriving; she feels her heart thudding—"You are too." She licks her lips and doesn't see Historia's eyes; how they've changed depths, bending inward, blind and concave, vague and evocative.

Mikasa continues stepping with the music, stepping in and out of her own legs, feeling at once here and not here, framing Historia with her arms as the room drops into a red dreamlike sunset-sea, plunging them along with it as they dance in red.

Inside the mirror, they spin in miniature, highlighted by the slanted light coming through the windows, empty, bereft, orphaned, widowed: Mikasa, of the innocence: Historia, of the selfishness. They follow the waves of the music, dissolving into the dying percussions of sacrificed queens and their sad incestuous histories.

Historia elongates onto her toes. The small muscle of her calf slides up into a round knot, her face opening up like a compact. She begins to strain, her throat turned back. Where the royal crown would usually rest, the scent of Historia's hair emanates from her scalp, warmed by the rise in body temperature. A soft, powdery odor, like a little girl.

Mikasa doesn't pull away. She watches through her black unreadable eyes. On Mikasa's end, it is out of the curiosity and the inexperience, not out of the reciprocation. On Historia's end, it is out of the inexperience and the loss, not out of the initiation.

In the oval framed glass, a single red shadow floats in the sunken red room.

Historia's calves relax, her feet soften. Her face is still slanted back, small again, smiling with just her lips. Mikasa starts to speak. Historia's touches Mikasa's mouth. She's still smiling with only her lips. Wordlessly she turns.

Without looking at Mikasa, she goes across the room and turns off the music. Her lips stay fixed up at the corners as the sound of the music being off fills the room. They stand in it, feeling everything go quiet and still, the red darkening to a somber black scarlet. Mikasa realizes then that the mouth which continues to smile is that of Krista Lenz and not of Historia Reiss: a smiling mouth with a rigid, porcelain, doll-like purposelessness. The lips never change as Historia begins to tremble.

She is still smiling when the thin nostalgic tears of remembered bereavement start to roll down her cheeks and the scarlet room turns black.

Eren

"What's the matter, Mr. Kruger? You're staring."

He's sitting up in his hospital bed, his back against the headboard. He looks at his hands. The pale undersides of his palms lay, face-up, in his lap. "Are you all right?" he says.

"Yes, of course," she says. "Why wouldn't I be?"

His head falls back against the headboard. He shudders. He doesn't answer. Although Miss Mary herself shows no outward sign of the aftermath, the echoing claps spin down Eren's ear canals. Punched into his retina flashes the indelible image of her engorged pink lips, sobbing, glistening, wet with saliva.

"Are you hungry, sweetheart?"

"No, I'm all right."

"From my experiences, I've learned men are always hungry."

"I'm not hungry." He shudders again, looking at his palms.

"You sweet, sweet boy." She comes to him, stepping right out of her nurse's slippers. Her eyes are warm and bright with compassion, her lips rouged in vicious red.

Eren already knows what she's going to say, bracing himself, transmuting into something stiff and wooden, without a pulse, without teeth, completely immune to anything like hunger.

"Men have special appetites, especially war-ridden men—and I'm a woman of infinite sympathy." Outside, light emits dim and sourceless through an impregnated gray sky. Next to his window, leaves flaring from an adolescent tree dip with invisible sporadic smatterings of weight.

"Would you like to see my tits?"

He removes his eyes from the window and puts them on her now. His legs are wooden out in front of him, under the sheets. She smiles. Her hands reach for her throat. His eyes turn away.

"Oh, Mr. Kruger." She croons at him with a sly, girlish lilt. "You're a _blusher._ "

His color deepens. His teeth grate on one another.

She puts her hands on the bed. His eyes drop to her perfect square fingernails.

"Here. Open my top." She caresses his fingers, cajolingly, drawing them to her buttons. "Go on, honey. I'm telling you to." He starts to cringe within himself, turning inside out. "Are you afraid? There's no reason to be. I won't hurt you."

"You remind me of someone," he says, finally. "She looks a bit like you. But her hair is . . ." Something behind the woman's face closes, though nothing on the surface changes. "It's not that," Eren says. "She's still alive."

Miss Mary wraps Eren's palm over her breast, sinking his hand into the soft clothed mound of her grown-woman flesh. Eren feels the blood emptying from his legs. Not as though he is bleeding out, but as though the blood itself is evaporating straight from his veins. "Does this woman have nice tits too?"

The blush thickens in Eren's face, all over again.

"What's the matter, honey? Why don't you to tell me about her? Is she Asian like me, is that why? I'm only half, you know."

Eren says nothing and his fingers rise and begin to undo the pearl-glass buttons. His fingers move without him having to think about the nurse at all, thinking only that he doesn't want to talk about Mikasa.

His fingers work down the front buttons. He hasn't undressed a woman before, but his fingers act and know how to do the unbuttoning anyway. He's only given a woman something without ever doing the undoing, like the jacket he put around Mikasa's shoulders, or the red muffler he put around Mikasa's neck. He's never had to do the undoing; he's never even wanted to do the undoing. He's just had to give something up. But this is a woman here, older than himself by a decade at least. Grown women want to be undone, he supposes, especially those who are at least a decade older. And somehow his fingers know how to do the undoing without ever having done it before.

When the fourth button comes free, the tension pinning the fabric closed gives way. Her skin breathes out, cupped by something lacy and black. She nestles her arms together and her chest quivers inside the black lace, divulging a generous fleshy view to him, and he thinks nothing other than: He's never once thought about Mikasa and the parts of her he hasn't seen—and even now he doesn't think about that, only thinking about how he's never thought about it while looking down the nurse's dress, not thinking about the nurse at all, still wooden and still immune to anything like hunger.

Rain starts to tap the window pane.

"It's all right, Mr. Kruger," she says. "I'll take good care of you."


	5. Chapter 5

Warning: sexual violence

* * *

? ? ?

In the underground crypt, an incomprehensible mass of flesh and limb moves without motion, not thrusting, not grinding, just pulsing, palpitating. They let go. Her knees thud to the ground. Her face steams, ten degrees hotter than her throat. Her eyes are blind, filmy, subhuman; unintelligent like fish eyes.

They grab her by the long black hair, and the straining roots of her scalp haul her up and off the ground, her head jerked at a near perpendicular. Her breast crashes flat against her chest bones, springing forward again, bulging out in a full reddening swell when a palm strikes her there, once, twice, then the same palm claps her between the legs, and her head jerks back, her engorged mouth gaped open, silent, submissive, suffocating, self-hating, the grip still in her hair. The straining roots of her scalp keep her chin high, thrust out and forward.

One man boots her in the neck and she falls bodily sideways, her eyes glazed with that fishlike, subhuman unintelligence. She braces on one arm, then rolls onto both, palms down-facing, her hips twisted sharply left, weakening, failing, never evolving beyond the small-minded, truncated worldview of a woman who not only needs men (for protection, for economy, for company, etc.), but identifies with the attachment, the parasitic role in which she's latched her claws into his ribs and calls herself wife, mistress, and whore. That is the symbiosis. To let him kick her in the neck as long as she can call herself his whore; to not just let him, but to entreat, and be entirely grateful for it.

She retches. Nothing but drool and a whitish saliva-mixture propels from her tongue.

She doesn't cry. She's not afraid of numbers. With an unflinching composure and female duplicity, she faces them. There are five men and only _One_ face: An erasure of the individuality, where one man becomes the next in a single expressionless non-identity, a face without any pathos or thought. Their actions already predetermined by a homogenous aggression and privilege that has been bred for hundreds of generations—and women thereupon bred with the obverse: the passivism and the inferiority in order to bring balance to all things. This is her place, she knows that.

In a draft she doesn't feel, a stream of wind she doesn't think is there at all, the light suddenly snuffs out, whipped off the lantern, flinging them into the crypt's underground dark. These are not the sort of men who can see in the dark, nor do these men care to see in the dark. All their lives they haven't needed to see in the dark. So they don't have the imagination to conceive the terrors of a dark place. But then, they've never needed to use the light either. Never needed to look at or around themselves for anything at all. Neither have their fathers or their fathers' fathers. For generations, indifferent, ignorant, and intolerant of the things they never even bothered to look at from the start.

She hears the click and scrape of tossed coin as they grope inside their pockets, and then the freeze as one of them either gives up or finds it.

"Did you get that light?"

"Where's that light?"

"Ay—that light."

She doesn't climb from her knees. She never climbs from her knees, only falls onto them, the way pious men are conditioned to fall, day after day, into prayer at breakfast, lunch, and dinner without ever thinking about why. _Dear God, thank you for this meal. Amen._

On all fours, she crawls to the side.

Slowly it fans across the floor. She can't see it. She can only hear the small, crackling, pooling sound as the stone absorbs the fluid; can only feel and smell the air condensing with an outpouring of warmth.

She fumbles her hands out in front of her, her toenails scuffling behind. A forelimb connects with a hot, slack-muscled mound. She jerks backward. Her knees hit the ground, softly, like two rotted peaches.

She sees a spit of light. It shrivels into a star, going dark. Another snap—and the light expands, blowing open the four walls of the secret room around her: unfurnished, bricked with stone, subterranean, a black retrograding exit. Next to the burning wall lamp, poised in an up-reaching hand, the silver lighter spurts its tiny flame.

Light sheds across a different man, a man whom she hadn't seen come in. It must've been some time after the five had overtaken her, flowing her into the chapel, sweeping her down into the crypt. He flicks the light closed. That's when she realizes his eyes are like the lighter, able to flick open and closed with illumination and heat. He's a man who can see in the dark. He pockets the lighter.

The five men lay around her, arms and legs bent off and away like collapsed scarecrows without the wooden stakes, with opened black throats and all the black throbbed out of them.

She thinks, _A man only saves a woman from other men so that she'll become subservient to him and only to him, so that she can never become his equal or equal to any extrapolation of himself, subordinated by that false, double-edged chivalry._

Without climbing from those peach-rotted kneecaps, she says, "What's one more?" while still crouched on the ground, her dress still near the exit, wrinkled and deflated, the sleeves poised in a fleeing lurch, as if she had disintegrated directly out of it in the thrashing struggle. "You're all the same breed. You're one creature incarnated into a thousand faces. So what's one more when there were five of you already?"

His mouth barely moves when he says, "I've come here to ask you a few questions," and his voice seems to boil up from the profundity of solitude—not merely the solitude of a solitary man, but the historical and ancestral solitude of a person without a name, without a past, ageless and neutral.

"Questions? There's something you don't know, and you think that I do? _Me?_ " She grins rigidly. "Go away. Leave me alone. I know what you want. And I'll give it to you. I'll hate every second of it. But I'll give it to you. That's the way you want it, isn't it? That's the way all of you want it, isn't it?"

Levi raises his knife by the grip. She crouches lower, her palms pressed flat on the ground, her eyes reduced to the scared animal blindness of complete submission. He pulls the flap of his cloak to the side and reaches behind his back and slides the blade into a leather strap and lets his hands fall and lay down, one against each hip, stiff like dried straw, shaped quick to violence, but laying down now.

On her hands and knees, the woman draws up a little, coming off her palms, still crouched low, in a misappropriated quivering squat. The black interspaces of rib bones and chest bones begin to jerk and throb. A noise is purged out of her, and it is nothing like laughing. But then Levi doesn't think it is laughter at all, and he hadn't thought she'd been smiling at him either.

"I hate short men," she says. "Little men have little dopey cocks. You little impotent limp-dick runt. You're not a man. You don't even look like one."

"You're losing blood."

"Of course, I am. Men don't bleed. Only women bleed because God wanted us to suffer and we don't stop suffering until we're old and useless. You're no man. You're just a little runt. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do? hit me? piss on me? fist me in the cunt? What are you going to do, huh? You bastard. You son of a bitch. Go on, then. Do it. What's one more? Can't you do it with that little dopey cock of yours? You're no man. So take your fist and do it, you coward. You goddamned coward. Then you'll be a man. right? right?" Her eyes show a full ring of white as she starts to laugh again, a shrieking noise of panic and the anxiety of not-knowing because solitary, individual men cannot be predicted, cannot be fathomed. Below her quivering squatting thighs, her red blood gushes, spreading into the pool of thicker black blood. "You'll never be a man if you got to use your fist. Ha ha ha ha! So why don't you just do it?"

With his hands still out, laying down against each flank, Levi turns over his palms, his wrists as stiff as sunbaked straw. Not only is he a man who can see in the dark, but he is a man who can open his palms without shame, without self-deprecation either, becoming no less than he was a minute before. He's not a long man, and he's not a broad man. He's just a small man. He snaps the button of his cloak undone, draping it over his elbow. Then he undoes the leather strap around his waist and lets it fall, scuffling it across the floor with his boot toe.

She watches, still on her knees, thinking it isn't the dropping of the knife, and it isn't the removal of the leather strap, it's the shedding of the cloak that has reduced him. She starts to make a small, whimpering noise. The interspaces of her rib and chest bones jerk again, this time without the laughter.

"Oh, god. Oh, god."

Her mouth opens without anything coming out yet. A second later the shriek fills and writhes from her mouth like a solid invisible mass of outreaching tentacles, ripping open the seam of her lips. Sudden tears run thickly, melting her eyeballs. In a trembling hunch, she jams her fists against her face, her knuckles embedded into the dissolving heat of her sockets, tears flowing fast around them.

He takes his folded cloak from the drape of his elbow and takes a few steps forward, making no sound at all, and spins it out in a ballooning arc. It settles closed around her naked shoulders. "I want to die," she whispers. "Just kill me, you . . . you . . ."

The cloak slips off. He draws it back around her and closes his fingers at her throat. "I told you, I have questions," he says, without so much pity or even sympathy as there is an acknowledgment of the human crises, quiet, nonviolent, and incurable. "And you're going to answer them for me."

Levi

When he reaches the two-story house, the sun has already set. Inside the vast lawnless yard, the madam and a few of the girls stand, huddled, speaking to each other. A latticed fence circumscribes them, and when Levi steps through the fence's entryway, his leg slips into an insulation of synthetic illusions and fantasies, as he is thrown twenty, No, thirty years into the past, already smelling the perfume and the mead, hearing the murmur of closing curtains and clambering high-heels, up the staircase and down into the basement as the house begins to stir inside; the change moving up his leg, thirty years backward.

Bunching up her skirt, the madam rushes over, her feet kicking up in a pair of laced ankle-boots. A red rosacea has flared across her pink face. She races nearer. Broken vessels stipple the flesh-knob of her nose.

"You've brought back my best girl. My raven-locked porcelain doll."

Levi holds her away from his chest by the sole strength of his arms, the muscles taut but not strained. She lies entirely upon the brace of his forearms.

"You can't go in, you understand. I'll take her from here."

Levi passes the girl into the madam's larger embrace. Her arms hold the girl without strain either, without labor, as if the girl weighs no more than a mannequin filled of wood shavings.

"I have questions that she alone has the answers to," Levi says. "And I'm depending on her to answer them."

"That's it? That's all you want?" The madam looks at his face. His eyes are grave, dark, heatless, and self-contained. "All right, all right," the madam says. "When she's feeling better, I'll send her in your direction. Thank you for bringing her home, Captain."

"That girl there." He gestures with his chin. Behind a tall girl stands another girl, smaller, with thin copper hair and the lean, shapeless frame of an adolescent boy. The dusk falls thick on her myriad freckles, falling scarce on the soft, white, baby skin between them.

The tall girl lays hands on the small one, as though the hands might snatch the girl right out of Levi's view.

"You can't take Breanne."

"There's an orphanage," he says. "Out in the country."

"Blessed," she says. "Are you the saint we've been praying for? Should I thank our holy walls?" A couple girls cough, stifling their mouths with their fingers, shuddering quietly in restraint.

The madam says, "Hush, now," with the black-haired girl cradled in her big arms, serene and unmoved, and then to Levi: "Yes, I know of it. Everybody knows of it. It's the queen's policy." Levi's eyes let go of the girl with the copper hair and move to the madam now. The rosacea has cooled a little in her cheeks. "That'll be all for one night. Go on home, Captain Levi. You'll hear from me again, don't you worry."

Eren

At nineteen years old, maybe he just wanted a mother again, it's been quite some time since he's had a mother. And the war began simply because he had wanted his mother. And although the war has already begun, he can't forget what it was like being a young boy, and that's keeping him from being a grown man because he hasn't been given the time to relinquish into the present and to nonviolently bereave himself of the past.

The nurse has the dark, dominant, feline eyes of a woman who only wants to make grown men cry. So she can't be his mother, she can't be even like his mother, and he can't be a boy anymore either, not now and not here. Maybe if she hit him, he'd think differently. Maybe if she yanked his hair and wrangled him like a gangly-limbed calf, he'd think differently. He relaxes his jaw when he realizes he's grinding his teeth. His nostrils stretch as he breathes and thinks about how little mental and emotional energy he had expended to amputate his own foot, almost like bringing down an axe on a defenseless, autonomous, forlorn log.

"Outside of war and violence," he says, "I suppose I haven't lived very much."

"This is your first time?" Miss Mary says, and when he says nothing back, she knows. "You won't have to do a single thing, Mr. Kruger. I'll take care of you. Is that all right? it'll be all right."

He seizes her wrist when she starts to lift the bed sheet, not resisting, not complying, and most certainly not dissenting. Then he starts to think of Eren Jaeger himself as a boy, as if it were not himself, as if he'd never been a boy at all; trying to be a grown man now without any experience or involvement from the childhood, relinquishing, trying not to think or remember, his logic and mind violated again by his own thoughts, bursting from that startling no-place subconscious like vomit — _sorry sorry no its nothing im fine_ — "I promise you, I'll be gentle." — _stop talking shhh you idiot_ — "You don't need to be afraid, honey. Relax."

Still not resisting, still not complying nor dissenting, violating himself with his own thinking — _im sorry im sorry shut up_ —

"I'll take good care of you," she says, whispering into his ear; and when he opens his eyes, he finds himself alone, with a sweating glass of water on the bedside table. He drinks until it's empty, never feeling quenched.

Levi

The alcohol sits like a ball of copper twine at the bottom of his stomach as he sits idly in the armchair. His knuckles prop his cheekbone in the indolent observation and detachment, as if it were not his eyes seeing the girl, as if it were somebody else telling him about seeing the girl, and his own mind begins to conjure up the images as they tell him about it. _The girl was made of wax_ , they would say—and he sees her now, made of wax too, the light shining lustrously on the hairless wax-flesh of her wrists.

And they would say: She was just watching the fire, doing nothing. And I was looking at her the whole time, not doing anything either. And I could see the backs of her knees under the white nightgown and in the blasting heat where she stood, that nightgown never did move. It just fell straight down her back like it was made of paper.

And Levi would say: You're not getting enough sleep, is all.

And they would say: I can't sleep at night. I've been trying to since I was eight years old. But sometime in the childhood, I think I forgot how. And I think you know why I forgot it.

The girl turns her head, the nightgown straight and unflapping against the soft backs of her knees. Levi lifts his cheek from his knuckles. Dim unimpressionable eyes of round, blank rubber are stamped into her face. His neck stiffens, the little hair-bristles lifting. Her head turns across the shoulder now. Her wax profile yields in bloodless, un-body, un-sexed un-substance against the hearth. Her soundless white foot lifts from the floor. She starts to leave. She steps out of the room and vanishes midstride out of sight.

They (that person telling him about the vision) describe this to Levi, and Levi imagines this part too when they say to him: Then I went after her because I wasn't going to suddenly remember how to fall asleep. I was just going to be sitting there all night, doing nothing—hey hey—Why are you looking at me like that? I'm not insane. I'm not. You know I'm not.

The hallway writhes with its invasive mind-worms inside a darkness so complete that sight is inverted. Not as though sight has been temporarily revoked, but that the optic nerve itself has been clamped in a tourniquet, stopping the stream of vision altogether, pumping it straight backward down the neurons now, not in blindness, but in un-sight.

He follows her, not seeing any trace of her, knowing exactly where she's going and where she will be, knowing exactly where he's going and where he will be too. When he finds her at the end of the hall, her face is pale, her eyes as blank as rubber, the window grave and dark behind her. Mikasa drops onto her hands, striking the floor with her palms. The white nightgown floats a moment without her. Levi watches her lips flinch open and the cords in her neck suddenly inflate. Heaving up in a strong convulsion of stomach muscles, she makes a low guttural sound and vomits a puddle of thick colorless stomach bile.

Levi moves next to her and touches the back of her neck. The underlayer of hair is wet and cold. He squats down.

"Captain," she says, saliva running in thick bright tendrils from her lips. "I don't feel so good." The back of her hand smears across her mouth. Her wrist comes away, glistening.

She sinks to the floor, arms braced beneath her, in a half push-up, legs wrung sideways, knees facing out. Her calves slide against each other, weakening, as the interval between her chest and the floor detracts, like gravity has found that pin in her sternum and pulls her down by it. Her cheek quietly drops against the rug, and she goes limp.

He lifts her with a thrust of his arms. Her pores secrete a cold, sick sweat, deprived of any real fever, vacant of warmth. Her body slumps against him, liquid, heavy, unresponsive, faint. Her right arm dangles like a dead wooden limb.

When he reaches the room, he puts her on the bed. The sheets crackle with disuse. The room is neat and plain without identity. A private, auxiliary bathroom cuts back from the west wall.

He puts on a light and goes into the bathroom and turns on the faucet. He fills a bowl with water and comes back into the room, the cloth in one hand, the bowl of water in the other. He puts both down on the bedside table and draws up a chair and sits in it. The nightgown sags against her body. Clingy, translucent circles fan out in the material. Beneath the gown, she shivers, pumping out unceasing rivulets of cold sweat. He dips his fingertips in the bowl; the water is warm. He dips the cloth in next, wringing the rag. Trickling water wimples the mirror-surface inside the bowl.

He mops her forehead and behind the ears. The whole time her blank black eyes stare through him, not seeing him, not really looking either. Little black hairs swirl wetly in the frame of her face, her complexion as white as ceresin wax.

She says, "I think I'm pregnant."

For a moment, he says nothing, mopping her throat with the warm rag, his face without expression. "That," he says, "is impossible." And he almost says too, _Eren is across the ocean,_ but he doesn't say that, just thinking it, then wondering if it actually is possible, if she'd been sleeping and he'd been sleeping and without being in the same room, without being on the same continent even, sleeping together at the same midnight hour, both on their backs in horizontal repose, if they could've met each other somehow that way. A child born out of the concept and the shared mind-space, rather than the conjoined body.

"Yelena told me a story," she says, vaguely, as if she's unaware he's there, as if she's forgotten that she's speaking out loud. Merely moving her mouth, looking right through him. "It was about a virgin mother who bore a son."

"I don't know that story."

Her eyes sink into her head. Her face turns away. More sweat boils coldly from her pores, rolling pale down her neck into the hollow of her throat. Her nightgown falls cold and wet on her body. She shakes. With the warm, damp rag, he mops her face and tucks away wet hair.

"It's only a story," he says.

"I know," she says, without opening her eyes, still speaking without trying to make speech, still unaware he's there at all. "I had hoped that I wouldn't have to do anything. I wouldn't even have to try. It'd just happen, and Kiyomi would be satisfied."

". . . ?" Levi dips the rag back into the bowl again. The ice water in the rag seeps away, transplanted by the bowl's warm water. "At that time, you had a strange expression. Did that woman say something strange to you?"

"I was a little surprised at first," she says. "But it's nothing in the end."

 **Levi**

Mikasa looks wan with the labor now. The labor of illness and staying awake long past midnight. She sits up and pulls in her legs, tucking them under her. From her shifted thighs rises a faint, musky, brassy odor. It isn't the sweat. It doesn't have the same ill, gelid, pale scent. She seems to perceive the odor too, reverting her head, looking down behind her. Levi looks behind her too. His gaze overlays hers.

They see, seconds apart, that it has sunk through the seat of her nightgown in a dark vivid stain.

She starts to say something and lifts off her knees, silent, cringing. She tries again to speak, inarticulate, abashed, and apologetic: "I hadn't realized—I need to—" Levi touches her wrist. His mouth has blanched. The veins in his temples look black and thin. "I need to—"

 _It's nature's cycle,_ he thinks, _that's all it is_. The color washes back into his mouth. She starts to lift off her knees again, shrinking, her wrist still closed inside his fingers. He opens the bedside drawer and takes up a tin container of tissues. He gives her a few. She takes them with a pale hand. He releases her arm.

"I'm sorry about your sheets. I'll replace them with new ones." She reaches the tissues under her nightgown, secretively, in a kind of embarrassed introversion, angling her knees away from him. "It seems I've put you in an awkward situation. I'm sorry about that too."

It must be driving her insane, he thinks, trying to listen to her own blood quietly pulling behind the loud call and urgency and demand of their current situation. The unreadable, incalculable face of hers, like an unmarked dial, has nowhere to look, averted in profile, with a sort of mute introverted shame, and it shouldn't be shame, it shouldn't be embarrassment either. For a woman, she doesn't seem to know much about nature. But then maybe she's never been taught it because she didn't have a mother. She's only had those two boys of the same age, who could neither teach nor empathize—or perhaps it was Eren who taught her, since he seems to have taught her everything else, but his information was obviously incomplete and abstracted. So all this time, she's been deconstructing the ignorance or maybe just living in denial and self-effacement, wanting to be the same, not being the same, going by whatever Eren had told her.

Now that the flow has started, the onset of pain seizes the interior muscles. Her teeth grit together. Levi dips the cloth into the bowl, wringing it, and wipes her forehead, raking the hair free of its wet cling. The contraction passes. One of her legs stretches down to the floor, the nightgown sticking to the back of her knee. She slides off. She gathers the bedclothes in her arms and starts to strip the mattress. He rises from the chair, lifting the bowl from the bedside table, going into the bathroom. Without the bowl, without the rag, he returns again. Behind him, the bath runs fast and hard.

"Go ahead and bathe," he says, in that forceless way of his, barely louder than the bath, perfectly clear, "and get some dry clothes on. I'll take care of the sheets."

Levi

It is either in the last few minutes of night or the first few minutes of morning when Levi relates to Hanji the myth about the virgin mother. Hanji already knows it. At a rectangular table in her private study, they sit together, she at the north end, he at the south. A ceramic cup of tea communicates its warmth into his palm where his hand is bent around it. Hanji's quill pen scrapes ink onto a page of a leather-bound journal. Down the length of the table, he hears each minute sound of the strokes, acutely, as if the pen tip were scratching the fragile bones of his inner ear. In the middle of the table a candle steadily burns, shedding light over Hanji's handwriting and the keratin gleam of her blunt fingernails.

Without looking up, Hanji says, "It's only a story." The pen continues to scratch at Levi's hearing. Too internal for him to do anything about it. "And there have been much worse than that."

The ceramic cup clashes quietly away from the saucer, then clashes quietly back when Levi puts it down again. "I'm sure most people," he says, "at some point, wish they could be God."

"I never knew you were that kind of person, Levi. I'm sorry to hear it," and still never looking at him, writing by the candlelight, and Levi likewise enduring the scraping pen-tip.

He leans his face on his knuckles, his ear slightly flattened back, contracted in the interior agitation. "It's as you said. It's only a story."

Boys can't understand. But once he had become old enough to divide the world into its institutionalized arbitrary logic, he began to see it. That women are martyrs and all-mothers—and he has no father, or perhaps he has many fathers, and he will never know the answer to this: but maybe his mother had never acquiesced, that it'd been the faceless father or the many fathers who thumbed the seed into the soil before she'd ever thought of becoming a mother, and she had grown it anyway, delivered it, and christened it Levi, a name which had come from the same archaic book of stories in which the virgin mother gave birth to the son of God.

This world is patrilineal, and therefore a mother's name has no value and consequently a bastard son has no ancestry. And now a grown man, Levi begins to understand this: Sin has been gathering in his hands since he learned how to wield them, and yes, he has known this, he has accepted this, and he doesn't repent or even feel the need to. But the sin, he sees now, began before the hands, before the childhood, before the infancy. He has committed the unforgivable sin of conception itself.

As the realization sets in, the sin thickens and weighs down the irredeemable fatherless blood so that he can never again forget his breeding, his roots, realizing too that the long black hair was not to blame but, in fact, himself.


End file.
